BlackBerry Planet: The Story of Research in Motion and the Little Device that Took the World by Storm

By Alastair Sweeny

BlackBerry Planet is a new tribe of people who simply cannot get along without their favorite device, Research in Motion’s innovative electronic organizer, the BlackBerry. This omnipresent device has gone beyond being the world’s foremost mobile business tool and entered the consumer mainstream as the Swiss Army Knife of smart phones.

BlackBerry Planet tells the behind-the-scenes story of how this little device has become the machine that connects the planet. Starting with the early years of Mike Lazaridis’ invention and his founding of RIM at age 23, it details his drive to innovate, developing what was a glorified pager into the essential corporate communicator, used by everyone from dealmakers to the Queen, from movie stars to the entire US Congress. Since 1992, Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie together have been the driving force behind the RIM story.

With access to senior staffers and former RIM employees, BlackBerry Planet tells the inside story about the branding and marketing success of the BlackBerry, from its use during 9/11, which earned RIM a reputation for security and reliability, to the cultural adoption of the iconic device as a must-have symbol, to the backlash against the addictive properties of the “CrackBerry,” and the various patent suits RIM has had to fight off – including the five-year court battle that resulted in the largest technology patent settlement in US history.

As the incredible story of the BlackBerry unfolds, and as RIM battles global giants like Nokia and Apple in the emerging super-phone marketplace, users, fans, investors and competitors can look to BlackBerry Planet for the insight and context of where they’ve been, to try and predict where they’re going.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Oct 27, 2009
• ISBN: 9780470675816

Alastair Sweeny

Alastair Sweeny is the author of several books on Canadian history and technology, including George-Étienne Cartier: A Biography, BlackBerry Planet, and Fire Along the Frontier: Great Battles of the War of 1812. He is the founding director of canadachannel.ca, a series of Canadian educational portals created by well-known authors in the fields of education and Canadian history. 

Book preview

1

The Planet Goes BlackBerry

When they go to work, people expect a phone, a desk, a chair, a light. And a BlackBerry has really taken on that status.

—Mike Lazaridis

Mike Lazaridis’s little device is the favorite fruit of 25 million people across the planet who just can’t get along without their innovative electronic organizer. But a scarce ten years ago, the BlackBerry was known to only a few movers and shakers in Washington, on Wall Street or in big high-tech firms like Intel and IBM.

Back in 1999, Research In Motion (RIM) built the first reliable product to offer two-way mobile e-mail and messaging. At that time, pagers holstered on belts were part of the MD’s or Wall Street broker’s uniform. But they allowed only one-way communication. Lazaridis had realized that corporate technophiles wouldn’t want to be tethered to their computers and would, instead, love to work anywhere, sending and receiving e-mail directly on their pagers.

So, the BlackBerry easily won a favored spot on the belts of hard-charging political staffers and business professionals, from wireless warriors, out in the field and battling for market share, to cubicle cowboys lunching at their desks, hunched over BlackBerrys and juggling work and home.

Today, the BlackBerry monopolizes the world of work—nobody else comes close. An astounding 85 percent of public corporations are supplying staff with the devices, and more than 175,000 BlackBerry Enterprise Servers are installed worldwide. The US Congress was RIM’s first big client, and Uncle Sam is still the biggest consumer of BlackBerrys. Today, more than 500,000 devices are installed in every department of the U.S. government and throughout the US Senate and House of Representatives.

Some larger corporations are handling tens of thousands of e-mail accounts securely and efficiently, and the top three or four companies each manage close to 100,000 BlackBerry users. Security is key. BlackBerry messages are secured with NATO-grade encryption, and network managers love the ability to freeze or wipe data from a lost or stolen BlackBerry.

The BlackBerry is also super-efficient. Studies show users can boost their productivity by 30 percent, and BlackBerry messaging is compressed, sometimes twenty times more than competing systems, so companies save a bundle in bandwidth costs.

But RIM has also adapted the BlackBerry to serve the consumer as well, and today more than 60 percent of users are outside the enterprise, buying their services from telecom providers.

007

RIM’s original wireless devices were just glorified two-way pagers, used mainly by police, firefighters, and ambulance drivers. But that was a maturing market. When the company added enterprise servers with e-mail, calendars and contact lists to its first BlackBerrys, RIM started to get some real traction on Wall Street and inside the Washington Beltway. RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie was so confident that they had a winner on their hands, he seeded hundreds of those first BlackBerrys to influential users. Soon, a growing number of leading executives, bankers, opinion makers and politicians were adopting the addictive little devices.

Unfortunately for RIM, the BlackBerry was still unknown on Main Street, and growth sputtered. The big telecom providers weren’t helping the picture. At the time, they were obsessed with selling their cell phone services, and wireless texting was a distinctly unsexy secondary market.

It took a tragedy to get the BlackBerry to launch velocity, and it happened suddenly, on September 11, 2001.

During the horrific attacks that day in New York and Washington, the only people trapped in the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers who were able to contact their loved ones after cell service failed were those with BlackBerrys. Police, firefighters, and ambulance drivers and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney all used their BlackBerry devices during the crisis.

According to a RIM insider at the time, During 9/11, RIM staff were PINning [messaging] the hell out of the Mobitex and DataPac networks used by people with BlackBerrys caught in the towers, while the support workers relied on them to communicate even while the regular cell lines were dead. The text network survived while the cell network died because it was barely used and signal strength was possible from remote nodes.¹

Throughout the evacuation and collapse of the Twin Towers and during the surge in traffic, Cingular kept its text-only Mobitex network running despite losing many base stations in lower Manhattan. While slow at 12.5 kilobits per second, Mobitex on BlackBerrys kept running while others failed because it did not have to share precious bandwidth with voice. Also, even if an e-mail got delayed because of network congestion, it was queued and sent just a few seconds later.

After 9/11, more and more police and fire departments as well as U.S. federal authorities signed up for BlackBerry services. BlackBerrys also shone during the great 2003 Northeast Blackout and hurricanes Anita and Katrina. But it was in the U.S. Congress where the BlackBerry first gained a serious foothold, when all the politicians and their staffs were given the device, and all the lobbyists and people doing business in Washington followed. Capitol Hill became the first dedicated metropolis on BlackBerry Planet.

008

RIM’s BlackBerry first came to the notice of congressional leaders during 9/11 when poor communications hampered the evacuation of the Capitol building. Washington was literally under attack for the first time since August 1814. It was only by luck that the third plane did not crash into the Capitol or White House. Michigan Representative Fred Upton, who already owned a BlackBerry, was one of the few able to get messages in and out during the chaos. RIM suddenly had a sterling reputation for security, and the U.S. Congress took notice.

A few short weeks later, the October 2001 anthrax scare focused even more attention on BlackBerrys, since Congress had to start sterilizing mail for biological hazards and screening it for bombs. This event delayed regular mail delivery to lawmakers by up to two weeks.

Faced with these two crises, a rattled U.S. Congress promptly spent $6 million to buy BlackBerry Enterprise Servers and 3,000 devices for all 100 senators, 435 House members, and thousands of staffers. There were really no other contenders, and Capitol Hill was soon hooked. Within a few years, Congress had more than 8,200 installed BlackBerrys, and congressional servers were handling more than 25 million e-mail messages a month.

The BlackBerry quickly became a congressional essential. In 2006, Congress panicked and nearly declared a second American Revolution when Judge Spencer in Virginia, trying the NTP patent case against Research In Motion, threatened to shut down the BlackBerry service completely. Members of Congress rose unanimously against any threat to their constitutional right to bear BlackBerrys.

Today, BlackBerrys have become so pervasive in American politics, the show could probably not run without them. New Jersey Representative Scott Garrett, recently interviewed by Politico, had this to say about his BlackBerry use:

Garrett: Yeah, today I was without it for about 45 minutes, and the whole time it was like panic.

Politico: I don’t understand how members can outright not use one. It almost seems impossible.

Garrett: Well, obviously we did it before there were BlackBerrys.²

THE AGE OF TELEPOLITICS

U.S. politics today is a fast-moving, lobby-driven profession, and the BlackBerry is a perfect prop and timely tool for lawmakers. In Washington, D.C., every congressional committee meeting is like an electronic trading pit, where competing vote traders watch the action intently, thumbing messages to and from their home offices. And behind every successful politician you’ll find an army of BlackBerry toting telepols, all plugged in to their leader.

Florida Representative Adam Putnam, who was part of the first freshman class to be issued a BlackBerry, says that member-to-membermessaging is now pretty routine in the House. He says his party’s leadership has started e-mailing key materials directly to members each morning, bypassing press people and staff. He feels the handhelds have broadened members’ horizons by boosting their comfort level with the Internet: So, you have members talking about what’s on Drudge or Town Hall or Red State. BlackBerrys have dragged members out of the Dark Ages and into the information age. You now have members conversant about blogs, online news sites, signed up for breaking news alerts. So they’re actually less insulated today . . . than they were before BlackBerry.³

009

Karl Rove has more bandwidth, I think, than any presidential advisor has ever had in history.

—Mark McKinnon, Bush media consultant

The White House installed its first e-mail services under George Bush Senior, but he personally never used them. Now, however, the elder Bush describes himself as a black belt wireless e-mailer. During Houston Astros’ games, he sits behind home plate with his BlackBerry and waves back on TV when he gets e-mails from friends.

Bill Clinton was not a BlackBerry fan and sent only two e-mails during his entire term, preferring to use a secure cell phone and dedicated fax line. Even then, he felt increasingly isolated in the Oval Office, a place he liked to call the crown jewel of the federal penal system. According to Clinton aide Paul Begala, Presidents can stay in touch with their pre-presidential friends, but they have to work at it. In the pre-BlackBerry age, presidents gave their friends their special, secret ZIP code, listed their names with the White House operator, with instructions to put the calls through, even gave out the cell phone numbers of close aides.⁴

George W. Bush was expecting to be the first BlackBerry president, but he had to give his up on assuming office due to concerns about e-mail security and the Presidential Records Act (PRA). The PRA puts each president’s correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review or able to be subpoenaed by Congress or the courts. So, three days before Bush’s first inauguration, knowing he was about to be locked into the Oval Office, he sent a mournful message from [e-mail] to forty-two friends and relatives that explained his predicament: Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace. This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.

But for Bush’s entourage, some of whom used their Republican National Committee BlackBerrys and e-mail accounts, it was business as usual. During the 2002 election season, Bush’s friend and operative Karl Rove wore his war room on his belt. Rove’s BlackBerry held his Rolodex and e-mail system, which he used to flash marching orders to campaign workers and soothe worried lobbyists. Rove was such a BlackBerry devotee that Time magazine reported his device had every appearance of being surgically attached to his hand.

Rove, a.k.a. The Boy Genius, amazed people with his BlackBerry use. It’s like haiku, said a friend. Even in the middle of meetings with Bush, Rove would spin the thumbwheel and punch out pithy messages with his big thumbs. Sometimes we’re in a meeting talking to each other, said a colleague, and BlackBerrying each other at the same time.⁵

Unfortunately for Rove, his attempt to do an end-run around the PRA by using Republican National Committee e-mail accounts was slammed by a Washington judge, who called it an apparently flagrant violation of the Presidential Records Act.

George W. Bush’s lack of a BlackBerry may have insulated him more than he wanted to be. In Angler, Barton Gellman’s book about the Cheney vice presidency, Cheney was facing a growing revolt by the Justice Department over warrantless wiretapping, and the acting attorney general finally came to see Bush and told the president he was refusing to go ahead. This crisis had been going on for six weeks, and nobody had been able to tell the president.

Bush was completely shocked when he realized how insulated he had become.

Says journalist Julian Sanchez, Nobody wants to give the boss unwelcome news, and so the person at the top of the hierarchy often ends up least aware of what’s going on. It’s all too easy to imagine an online president getting bogged down in an unmanageable flood of correspondence, but there’s also clear value in finding some way for folks at a few steps’ removed from the inner circle to circumvent the minders and get the attention of the president directly. Maybe it’s time for Digg.gov?⁶

Bush recalled that when he was governor of Texas, I stayed in touch with all kinds of people around the country, firing off e-mails at all times of the day to stay in touch with my pals. When he returned to private life, says aide Karen Hughes, he immediately signed back on.

Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, was also a BlackBerry addict and called himself America’s first e-governor. He listed his e-mail address publicly, and personally answered hundreds of constituent e-mails a day. He feels his administration helped change how the government and people interrelate and helped make Floridians generally more hopeful and optimistic. In December 2006, Jeb Bush unveiled his official portrait at the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. It showed him standing beside a bookshelf, with his personal BlackBerry next to a picture of his family.

010

In just the first few weeks, I’ve had to engage in some of the toughest diplomacy of my life. And that was just to keep my BlackBerry.

—Barack Obama

During the 2008 U.S. election campaign, Barack Obama campaign director David Axelrod got more and more frustrated when team attention wandered away during strategy meetings and participants went into BlackBerry Prayer Position. Even candidate Obama would sneak a peek at his device. So Axelrod came up with a brutal way of dealing with the problem: during work sessions, at the first sign of people getting into position, he ordered all participants, Obama included, to unholster their BlackBerrys and place them in the center of the table.

Obama was the first true BlackBerry candidate. During the campaign, aides did not send him printed stacks of briefing books but rather e-mailed digests to his BlackBerry for review. He looked at longer documents on his laptop computer, putting his editorial changes in red type. He also relied on his BlackBerry to keep the home fires burning, e-mailing his wife and daughters constantly. And before bed, he played a few games of BrickBreaker to unwind; reports say the president’s high score is around 15,000.

Right after Obama’s election win, he replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail from his BlackBerry with the line How about that?

Ultimately, Obama had to face the same BlackBerry issues as George W. Bush. Even though he was elected in the most technologically sophisticated presidential campaign in history, the Secret Service told Obama he would have to give up his BlackBerry for security reasons, once installed as chief executive. Hackers around the world would rise to the challenge of getting into the e-mail of the most important smartphone on Earth—look how easily amateur hackers got into Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account ([e-mail]) during the election campaign. Also, every word a president generated by way of correspondence had to be archived. Finally, the White House was heavily protected by an electronic security field, and wireless didn’t work too well inside.

Imagine you’re Barack Obama, said Michael Agger in Slate. Your operatives played social media like a fiddle while coordinating field operations via text message, e-mail blast, and iPhone app. You proved yourself to be a modern info-executive with your 3 a.m. e-mails and your preference for reviewing docs on your BlackBerry . . .. Now, you’re preparing to enter the White House, and your BlackBerry is about to be ripped from your clutches.⁷

Said Obama advisor Linda Douglas, Given how important it is for him to get unfiltered information from as many sources as possible, I can imagine he will miss that freedom. Campaign manager David Plouffe said that losing his BlackBerry would be more than just an inconvenience for Obama: It’s an important way for him to operate with his colleagues, but also it’s very important for him to stay in touch with . . . his friends and his family. It’s something he’s really struggling with. He does live his life through technology.⁸

Barack Obama had the guts to quit smoking during the election campaign; now the most powerful man on the planet was told he was going to have to go cold turkey on his BarackBerry as well. No doubt his wife, Michelle, had mixed feelings. An amateur video clip taken in Chicago showed her slapping her husband’s hand when he took his BlackBerry from his holster to check his e-mail during his daughter’s soccer game. He quickly put it back. Later in the game, the clip showed him patting his holster absentmindedly but not daring to pull out the device.

Obama was well aware he would have a harder time kicking his BlackBerry addiction, and in a post-election interview with Barbara Walters, he said that he was trying to find a way to keep both his BlackBerry and personal e-mail account:

One of the things that I’m going to have to work through is how to break through the isolation, the bubble that exists around the president. And I’m in the process of negotiating with the Secret Service, with lawyers, with White House staff . . . to figure out how can I get information from outside of the 10 or 12 people who surround my office in the White House. Because one of the worst things I think that can happen to a president is losing touch with the struggles that people are going through every day.

Some commentators felt that breaking his BlackBerry habit would be a good thing for Obama. Would the United States have wanted a BlackBerry president anyway, and a self-confessed CrackBerry addict to boot? Some studies show that BlackBerry-wielding multitaskers end up performing each task a bit more poorly since they are afflicted by continuous partial attention. Better a president who can concentrate on one crisis at a time.

But Obama continued to resist, even after his inauguration, and senior advisor David Axelrod told ABC News: He’s pretty determined.

In a New York Times interview, Obama told John Harwood: I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry. They’re going to pry it out of my hands.

HARWOOD: Well, are you, in fact, going to overcome this idea as anachronistic that presidents can’t use the most modern . . .

President-elect OBAMA: Well, here’s what I think I can get. I think I’m going to be able to get access to a computer somewhere. It may not be right in the Oval Office. The second thing I’m hoping to do is to see if there’s someway that we can arrange for me to continue to have access to a BlackBerry. I know that . . .

HARWOOD: As of this moment, you still have your BlackBerry.

President-elect OBAMA: As of this moment, I still do. This is a concern, I should add, not just of Secret Service, but also lawyers. You know, this town’s full of lawyers. I don’t know if you’ve noticed . . .

HARWOOD: Yeah.

President-elect OBAMA: . . . and they have a lot of opinions. And so I’m still in a scuffle around that, but it—look, it’s the hardest thing about being president . . .

President-elect OBAMA: I don’t know that I’ll win, but I’m still—I’m still fighting it. And—but here’s the point I was making, I guess, is that it’s not just the flow of information. I mean, I can get somebody to print out clips for me, and I can read newspapers. What it has to do with is having mechanisms where you are interacting with people who are outside of the White House in a meaningful way. And I’ve got to look for every opportunity to do that—ways that aren’t scripted, ways that aren’t controlled, ways where, you know, people aren’t just complimenting you or standing up when you enter into a room, ways of staying grounded. And if I can manage that over the next four years, I think that will help me serve the American people better because I’m going to be hearing their voices. They’re not going to be muffled as a consequence of me being in the White House.⁹

In a third interview with John King on CNN, Obama was a little more belligerent about hanging on to his BlackBerry. I think we’re going to be able to beat this back, he said. I think we’re going to be able to hang on to one of these.

Obama said he would be careful about how he used the device: Now, my working assumption, and this is not new, is that everything I write on e-mail could end up being on CNN. So I make sure that—to think before I press ‘send.’

Describing his BlackBerry as just one tool among a number of tools that I’m trying to use, to break out of the bubble, the yet-to-be-inaugurated Democrat said he wanted to make sure that people can still reach me. But if I’m doing something stupid, somebody in Chicago can send me an e-mail and say, ‘What are you doing?’ You know? Or ‘you’re too detached’ or ‘you’re not listening to what is going on here in the neighborhood.’ I want to be able to have voices, other than the people who are immediately working for me, be able to reach out and—and send me a message about what’s happening in America.¹⁰

PRICELESS PUBLICITY

All this will he or won’t he commentary about Barack Obama’s BlackBerry was a godsend for RIM.

Doug Shabelman is president of Burns Entertainment, which arranges deals between celebrities and companies. He estimates the worldwide publicity value of the president’s struggles to keep his beloved Verizon BlackBerry 8830 World Edition Curve on assuming office at about $50 million. He’s consistently seen using it and consistently in the news arguing—and arguing with issues of national security and global welfare—how he absolutely needs this to function on a daily basis . . . Think about how far the companyhas come if they’re able to say, ‘The president has to have this to keep in touch.’

Laura Ries, president of marketing-strategy firm Ries & Ries and co-author of four books on brands and marketing, pegs the publicity value to RIM at more than $100 million a year if Obama were able to make product endorsements. That would top the marketing take of Tiger Woods, she said. How often does a president get photographed? Every five minutes. The potential of him being in a photo using a BlackBerry in all likelihood is incredibly high. That would be very powerful.

A big chunk of the public sympathized with Obama’s problem. In a San Francisco Chronicle poll, 50 percent of respondents said NO when asked whether Obama should have to give up his BlackBerry, and 24 percent argued he should keep it to create a record of his presidential doings. A further 18 percent said he’ll be too busy with other matters to bother with checking his e-mail.

Lori Sale, head of artist marketing at the Paradigm Talent Agency, says that the fact Barack Obama was not paid to promote his BlackBerry is even better for Research In Motion. What makes it even more valuable than that is how authentic it is, she said.

Fran Kelly, CEO of ad agency Arnold Worldwide, said that Obama’s tacit endorsement worked both ways. While he did a lot for the BlackBerry brand, the smartphone boosted Obama’s image in turn. The BlackBerry anecdotes are a huge part of Mr. Obama’s brand reputation, he said. It positions him as one of us: he’s got friends and family and people to communicate with just like all of us. And it positions him as a next-generation politician.¹¹

John McCain suffered in comparison, when he confessed to reporters that he didn’t know how to check e-mail and relied on his wife for computing. On the other hand, his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, governs by BlackBerry. She has

Reviews for BlackBerry Planet

[gshuk_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Avoid this book. There was an interesting chapter on RIM’s history and another on the lawsuits but that was it. The rest of the book seemed to be filler with unsubstantiated facts. It went into way too much detail about things that would have been edited out of most magazine articles.